Talent Show
by ancarett
Summary: Has Clark been hiding his talent for far too long? Lois thinks so.


_Use your talents. That's what they are intended for._

Clark's eyebrows rose as he contemplated the words on the slip of paper that he'd cracked out of his fortune cookie.

"What's it say?" Lois asked as she leaned across her desk in the bullpen. The cavernous basement space was dark around them as they were the only two reporters still toiling away this late on a Friday night.

Clark said nothing, just handed the paper over to his girlfriend who chortled, not unkindly, around her a mouthful of crisp almond cookie.

"Mine says to _Look before you leap_," Lois said as she contemplated Clark's fortune. "That's not nearly as interesting."

Clark's eyebrow rose. "I think that's actually some good advice, Lois. Maybe you should follow it."

"When you follow yours," she said.

Clark rolled back and forth as he leaned back in his chair, contemplating her carefully neutral expression. "What do you mean?"

Lois snorted. "You know."

He didn't. At least, Clark hoped that she wasn't back to hinting what she had before, about him being the Blur. Although he felt bad about keeping her in the dark, there was another part of Clark that just wanted a simple, straightforward and real relationship that he was afraid his superpowers would taint.

He tried to keep his own expression as bland as hers while his mind raced through the possibilities. "What talents am I not using?"

Lois pulled her chair closer to the desk and picked up a carton from their dinner. With one hand deftly wielding chopsticks, she picked through the remains of the dish, avoiding Clark's eyes. "You'd know better than I would," Lois said airily.

Clark looked down at the empty carton at his desk. "Why don't I just clean this up so we can get back to the story," he began to offer before Lois angrily interrupted.

"Don't you get it, Clark? I know that you can do a lot more than this," she impatiently gestured around the darkened basement floor.

Clark spread his hands in feigned helplessness, fighting a rising worry. "Are you saying _The Planet_ isn't good enough for me?"

Lois stood up in a flash, shoving her chair back with a squeak of the wheels. Arms braced on the desktop, she leaned forward, inadvertently offering Clark an eyeful of the cleavage revealed by her tightly fitted blue blouse. He tried not to let his gaze linger but it must have showed because she straightened abruptly, giving him a reproachful look before circling their desks to perch on the edge of his.

"Be serious, Clark. You know you can do better than this," she scolded. "Look, I know that I don't have the power to go beyond this, at least not right now, but you can and should. I don't know why you don't go ahead and do it."

Clark rolled back in his chair to its fullest extent, staring in confusion at Lois's intent expression. "I don't know what you mean, Lois," he said in honest dismay.

She huffed and picked up his nameplate from the desk, fiddling with it in both of her hands. "Look, Clark, we both know that you can go places right now and do things I can't. I don't know why you stick around down here when you could, you know!, be out there and up there."

Lois made a ziggy gesture up above her head and then dropped the name plate back on Clark's desk with a plastic clatter. She shook her head in seeming disbelief while Clark's brow furrowed deeply.

"Don't tell me this is going right over your head," she groaned.

Clark smiled a little uneasily, picking up the paper slip of his fortune and eyeing it dubiously. "Seriously, Lois, I'm not sure what talent of mine you think I'm hiding under a bushel here."

Lois leaned over her boyfriend, cocking her head first one way and then the other. "I suppose you wouldn't," she mused.

As if that settled that, Lois leaned back a bit on the desk. "Okay, Clark. It's just that I've been watching you here at the paper the last few months. You're a good reporter, you know. My influence, of course, at least a little."

Clark nodded, smiling slightly as he tapped his desk just above the drawers. "Your rules of reporting, of course."

Lois's own grin emerged. "Of course. But there's also a bit of native talent."

Clark harrumphed and she rolled her eyes at his modest protest. "Okay, maybe more than a little bit," Lois said. "Which is why I can't understand why you're still down here. Is it because of me? Because it shouldn't be."

Clark shook his head in puzzlement. "I don't know what you mean, Lois. Where do you think I should go? To _The Inquisitor_?"

Lois let her eyes widen in horror. "No way am I letting you go back over to that rag. They'd eat you alive, Smallville." She shook her head emphatically. "No. I just mean that you, unlike me, have the opportunity to go upstairs. You've got the talent and yet you stay down here with me."

Clark stood up, picking up Lois's hands in his and helping her off the desk. She wrested one free but he lightly held onto the other. "Where would I go without you, Lois?"

Her eyebrows rose dramatically. "Upstairs!"

Clark cocked his head warily. "Upstairs?" he repeated doubtfully.

"You know, Tess doesn't have a hate on for you the way she does for me. Your reporting is good, when you don't get distracted by a parking meter or picking up your shoes from the repair place or whatever other million errands seem to distract you some days," Lois huffed at the thought of all the wasted opportunities Clark had let get by.

"I'm sure if you asked her, even if you didn't, just hinted to the editor, that you wanted to be upstairs in Features, full-time, you'd be there tomorrow," Lois said. "But you don't. You just stay down here, reporting on broken watermains and dog shows with yours truly. I'm on the doghouse with Tess and you aren't. You should seize the day, you know, carpe diem and all that!"

"Lois," Clark interjected, lifting her hand between them and massaging it gently, "If anyone should be moving upstairs, it's you, not me. I can take my time and I'll wait until it's right, not just because I can."

Lois wrinkled her nose. "That's sweet of you, Smallville," she said, obviously wanting to continue the argument and tugging slightly at the hand he still held in his own. She glanced around them, nervously, but the rest of the reporting staff that shared the basement bullpen was long gone.

"Not a PDA," Clark advised gravely, "if there's no public to see what happens."

"Well, there could be," Lois hissed uncomfortably, tugging a bit more insistently.

Clark took a slow look around the quiet floor. Using his x-ray vision only confirmed what normal sight showed. They were entirely alone in the newspaper's basement.

"Nobody else would be around on a weekend night if they didn't have to, Lois, so don't worry. Anyway, I think you're ignoring another one of my talents, anyway, with all the push to get me out of the basement," Clark said, smiling broadly.

"And that would be?" Lois asked impatiently.

"This," he said as his lips closed over hers. Their kiss was slow and luxurious, but finally Clark managed to pull himself away from the temptations she presented.

Lois slowly opened her eyes with a satisfied smile that slowly morphed into a suspicious frown. "You're just trying to shut me up," she complained.

Clark laughed. "Is it working?"

Lois reached up to grasp his shirt front and tugged Clark closer. "I don't know," she said. "Let's see just how talented you are."

And Clark proceeded to do just that.


End file.
